Mobile madness as investors look to navigate the seas of rapid technological change

MUMBAI: Indian phone subscribers are increasingly going online in the small hours, spurred by various data plans from telcos that offer incentives for usage from midnight to early morning as a retention ploy in an intensely competitive market. The offers have been triggered by the entry of Reliance Jio Infocomm, which has offered free data and voice plans to win over subscribers. According to Counterpoint Research, until Jio's launch in early September, barely 1% of data was being used by consumers at night. That share has soared to 10-15%, with a jump in overall data usage.

NEW DELHI: Finnish telecom gear maker Nokia said the 4G LTE technology will drive broadband uptake in India as the usage picks up momentum beyond metro cities and reaches rural areas of the country. According to Nokia’s annual Mobile Broadband Index study, the significance and usage of regional and vernacular content is expected to increase as 4G and 3G networks expand in rural areas. Nokia said technologies like the Internet-of-things (IoT) and development of smart cities will further increase data usage in 2017.

BENGALURU: Catering to the internet users in tier II and III towns, technology giant Google is now focusing to expand usage of its products like 'Maps' and 'Search' in vernacular languages, especially Hindi. "While there are an estimated 500 million speakers of Hindi, there are just 100,000 Wikipedia articles. India's Internet population is growing really fast, from 100 million users in 2011, we are now the world's second largest Internet base with 300 million users and we are well-poised to touch 500 million base by 2017," Google India Marketing Director Sandeep Menon told PTI.

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You may not have heard of Dakele or Eton or K-touch but, till three years ago, they were among some 500 smartphone brands jostling for a slice of the ample Chinese mobile phone market. By 2016, that number may have come down to 100 and among the casualties were Dakele, Eton and K-touch, which had become China’s no. 3 mobile phone vendor after Nokia and Motorola in 2009. According to a March 2016 report in South China Morning Post, the three Chinese smartphone makers had suspended operations amid fierce competition, low profits and unsettled debt.

By Rajhkumar K Shaaw, Santanu Chakraborty and Nupur Acharya For India's biggest fund manager, S. Naren, there are better ways to gauge economic growth than the nation's much-reviled official estimate of gross domestic product. Naren says he relies on data for spending on soap and toothpaste, travel and electricity usage when deciding where to invest ICICI Prudential Asset Management Co.'s $29 billion assets. Double-digit demand growth for everything from fuel to air travel and air conditioners means he doesn't worry about whether GDP data overstates the economy's strength.

By Rajhkumar K Shaaw, Santanu Chakraborty and Nupur Acharya For India's biggest fund manager, S. Naren, there are better ways to gauge economic growth than the nation's much-reviled official estimate of gross domestic product. Naren says he relies on data for spending on soap and toothpaste, travel and electricity usage when deciding where to invest ICICI Prudential Asset Management Co.'s $29 billion assets. Double-digit demand growth for everything from fuel to air travel and air conditioners means he doesn't worry about whether GDP data overstates the economy's strength.

(Ron Dauphin)